Earlier this year, the KDE team released the highly-anticipated 4th major revision of the KDE desktop. Instead of bringing evolutionary changes, KDE 4.0 effectively delivered a complete rewrite of KDE, and as a consequence the first release of the KDE 4 branch lacked a lot of features of KDE 3.x, while also being quite unstable and rough. Many even complained the KDE team shouldn't have released KDE 4.0 as 4.0, but rather as a developer preview release or something similar. During this storm of criticism, the KDE team calmly pointed out that KDE 4.1 would fix many, many of the issues people had with KDE 4.0. Starting today, there's no more pointing towards KDE 4.1: KDE 4.1 has been released today.
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Member since:2006-02-05
Missing functionality is different then removing existing functionality, and very different then putting out half done functionality that hasn't been tested and is full of bugs. This is what I was saying, kde 4.0 is the exact opposite of an iterative process, they basically disappeared for a year and came back with something completely different.
Member since:2006-03-05
Disappeared for a year? We started porting KDE 3 to Qt4 in 2006. Since then we've released alpha and beta releases of KDE4 regularly. We've also released new version KDE3 regularly. In fact, another KDE3 release is around the corner. Calling that "disappearing" is not only at odds with us being accused of hype, but is, on the face of it, utterly ridiculous.
Member since:2006-09-10
Member since:2006-03-05
Slight, I'd advice you to learn the difference between "development release" and "developers release". The first is a release of software that's under development -- which means that all releases are "development releases", the second is a release that brings something of special value to developers. In the case of KDE 4.0, the release brought a lot of value to developers of applications based on the KDE platform. You don't have to understand that: I don't expect that of you, you can just take my word for it. I am a developer of an application based on the KDE platform, and until the 4.0 release I had a hell of a time. Afterwards, it was relatively smooth sailing, as smooth as it comes when developing software.
Member since:
2007-02-17
If indeed you did understand very, very well how open source code releases works, and you were being fair, then you would not have opined the following:
...
The only reason they made it a release is because they were already late, and didn't want to look bad by waiting another 7 months to do it right.
Rather, if you understood how it works, you would have understood that KDE 4.0 was ready for a .0 release ...
KDE 4.0 was indeed missing a great deal of functionality, no doubt. It was not ready if it were a commercial program, but it was ready for release in the sense it was an open source project following a "release early, release often" cycle of development.
For open source development programs, .0 releases do indeed lack significant slices of the eventual functionality. That is the way they are done.
Edited 2008-07-31 06:53 UTC